The product that each country in the European Union exports the most, explained in an interesting map

Something that globalization and the ease of selling and buying between countries brought is specialization. Over the last few years we have seen that there are certain countries that have become highly specialized in one industry, making it their hallmark abroad. That specialization is what we can see in this map of Visual Capitalist in which we see what the export strength of each country is. The spoiler is that not much has changed in recent years.

There are some surprises, but what is clear is that the cars rule.

German-dominated cars. If there is anyone pulling the wagon, almost literally, it is Germany. Its car exports represent an extremely strong industry worth $149 billion in value. Taking into account that it has some of the most powerful groups in the world with BMW, Mercedes, Audi or Porsche, in addition to the sub-brands of each of these groups, it is not surprising.

The logical thing would be to think that France is another strong country in this sense, but no, the second on the list is Spain with a more discreet, but equally powerful, 33.6 billion dollars in value in its car exports. The Spanish vehicle manufacturing industry is very strong and it is something that is reflected in this map. It will be interesting to know the data for all countries during 2023, since in Spain there was a strong increase in automobile exports, reaching 44,574 million euros.

And, in total, the import of cars from these countries is 257.2 billion dollars. As with others on the list, there are more countries that export this product, but it is not their main one and that is why they do not appear on the list. What does this mean? If we add cars produced by Italy or France, the market would be even more important, but they are already protagonists in other exports.

Oil and gas are not far behind. The second most important industry would be oil and gas. This is key for countries like the Netherlands with $68.1 billion in refined oil and Belgium with $54.7 billion in gas. The rest is far away, but in the end it is a market of 169.5 billion dollars.

As we said before, if we add the exports of other countries, it would increase. Spain, for example, is another very important when it comes to exporting refined oil, with 17.2 billion dollars in value in refined oil exports. It would be at the top of the list, but as we mentioned, here we only see the value of the products that each country exports the most.

Medications and vaccines. This is a vital sector for countries like Ireland or Italy. The first is the home of such important pharmaceutical companies as Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Novartis or Pfizer and its exports amounted to 47.3 billion dollars. Italy is the other heavyweight, with a strong packaged medicines industry that exported $34.4 billion.

Malta and Cyprus go about their business. Beyond the group of countries specialized in a sector, we have others that contribute to the set of European exports. They are “small” amounts, but the one that stands out the most is, obviously, France. The country specializes in aeronautical exports, accounting for some 26.6 billion dollars. It has a strong industry in both the civil and military sectors, so it is logical that aeronautics is its main value abroad.

On the other hand, we have countries that export between 1,100 and 1,600 million dollars in goods such as wood, electricity, iron and the cases of Malta and Cyprus, with integrated circuits and ships respectively.

And where? These data correspond to 2022, so we will have to wait to have the complete photo of 2023, but in that period, the value of the European Union trade agreements surpassed the two trillion euros (trillions of ours) for the first time.

This represented a growth of 30% on average and, outside the countries of the Union, the main destinations They were the United States (20%), the United Kingdom (13%) and China (9%).

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